Bellows, George Wesley, The Murder of Edith Cavell, 1918

George Wesley Bellows, American, 1882–1925
The Murder of Edith Cavell, 1918
Black chalk and black crayon over charcoal on cream wove paper
53.5 x 68.5 cm. (21 1/16 x 26 15/16 in.)
frame: 73 × 87 × 2.5 cm (28 3/4 × 34 1/4 × 1 in.)
Museum purchase, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund
photo: Martin Senn
x1958-61
George Bellows was the youngest artist associated with the New York Ashcan School, whose informal leader and teacher Robert Henri called for concentrating on the nitty-gritty of everyday life, capturing forms not with careful academic modeling but with quick impulsive sketching, so that the final image retains the dash and excitement of the initial impression. Following Henri’s lead, Bellows began painting urban scenes that exuded a raw, journalistic approach to his subjects, which ranged from slums to excavation projects. Under the influence of John Sloan, he tried his hand at etching and then lithography, becoming a master at achieving rich chocolaty textures and fluid line work. As the horrors of World War I increasingly intruded into the American consciousness, Bellows turned from cityscapes and scenes of illegal boxing to more polemical work, including a series of paintings and lithographs inspired by reports of German atrocities in Belgium. This drawing is preparatory for the lithographic version of probably the best-known image in the series, which shows the heroic English nurse Edith Cavell descending a prison stairway before facing execution by a German firing squad after being accused of helping wounded Allied prisoners escape from a hospital. Her death in 1915 aroused worldwide public indignation.

The artist’s consummate graphic virtuosity is conveyed in the dramatic contrasts of black and white for expressive purposes. Within a design comprised mainly of large rectangles, the strong diagonal of the stairs visually propels the stark figure of Cavell downward to her fate. Bellows conveys the event’s powerful emotional content through the combination of emptiness in the compositional center, a general stillness among the figures, and the bold contrast of murky passages with brilliantly spotlighted areas.